10 Spectacular Cases of Musicians Selling Out in Ads

With the Super Bowl just around the corner, that means just one thing: A lot of advertisements await millions of Americans this Sunday afternoon, and with Fox reportedly asking $4 million for 30 seconds of ad time during the game, there’s a lot of pressure on advertisers to deliver something memorable.

We don’t know what to expect from this year’s batch of ads—well, other than the ones that have been censored by other advertisers—but we know what we’re hoping for: Ads in which musicians exchange their credibility for large paychecks and a shot at commercial immortality.

Don’t scoff; there’s a long, proud history of this kind of thing, and one that goes a lot farther back than Feist selling “1234” to Apple. In fact, just last week Tegan and Sara lent their voices to a commercial for Oreo’s newest monstrosities, Cookie Dough and Marshmallow Crispy Oreo Cookies. (Yes, seriously.) Here’s their proudest moment, along with nine other of the greatest sell-out moves ever, complete with videos of their shame. You’ll never look at David Bowie in the same way again.

Bing Crosby & Al Jolson/Philco (1947)

Leave it to old pros like Crosby and Jolson to show everyone how to sell out in style. This live-to-air jingle from one of Crosby’s 1940s radio shows does everything right: the two perform the song, but you can tell that they think it’s as ridiculous as you do. Best of all, by making themselves the butt of the joke, the advertisers can feel as if they’re included in the humor. Everyone wins.

Tom Jones/Coca-Cola (1965)

By the 1960s, ad executive Bill Backer (now you know where Mad Men got its central character) had figured out that jingles didn’t have to overtly sell the product as much as simply imply a connection between it and a good time. Hence the slogan “Things go better with Coca-Cola,” and this amazingly lazy subsequent ad from Tom Jones, in which he remade “It’s Not Unusual” with some new, Coke-centric lyrics. Still, he sounded like he was having a good time, and that’s enough, right?

Ray Charles & Aretha Frankin/Coca-Cola (1969)

As if a collaboration between Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin wasn’t enough to make this 1969 ad worth paying attention to, there’s a third big name in the mix—Neil Diamond was the man responsible for the song the two are singing. This song is good enough that it almost makes you wish that the three had worked together on a full album at some point.

Michael Jackson/Pepsi (1984)

In 1984, with the Thriller album under his belt, it seemed as if Michael Jackson could do no wrong…until this ad came along. Like Tom Jones’ earlier effort, this song just makes over a recognizable hit with new lyrics to emphasize the value of the chosen product. Unlike Jones, though, Jackson goes far enough to suggest that drinking Pepsi is some kind of signifier of the future, instead of just a beverage preference. Never mind Moonwalker, this should’ve been the first warning sign that things were about to go downhill. Well, that and the fact that his hair caught on fire while filming the ad.

David Bowie & Tina Turner/Pepsi (1987)

Oh, Ziggy. It’s not as if “Modern Love” is a particularly classic song, Frances Ha‘s attempt to rehabilitate it aside, but it still deserved better than being rewritten for this Weird Science-rip-off ad (That movie, by the way, had come out two years earlier, so it’s not even as if this was a particularly contemporary reference). The 1980s were a particularly bad decade for the Thin White Duke, but this ad does at least demonstrate that Tin Machine wasn’t his nadir after all.

Britney Spears/Pepsi (2001)

Given the pop ingenue charges often leveled against Britney, it’s no surprise that she ended up the spokeswoman for Pepsi around the turn of the century—or, for that matter, that her Pepsi jingle was almost indistinguishable from one of her album tracks from the period. The least she could’ve done was rewrite “Oops, I Did It Again” as “Oops, I Drink A Lot of Pepsi.”

Jack White/Coca-Cola (2006)

Coke regained the upper hand in the musician endorsement stakes with this jingle, written and performed by Jack White at a time when he was still best known as part of the White Stripes. Using a broader arrangement than many would expect, he created something that sounded both like a Jack White song and a classic Coke jingle. If Third Man Records goes belly-up, we know what he should concentrate on next.

Chris Brown/Wrigley Doublemint (2008)

Strange but true: “Forever,” which turned into a hit single for Chris Brown across the world, started off as this commission from Wrigley to rework its “double your pleasure, double your fun” jingle. Those lyrics actually made it into the finished full-length song, albeit transformed into the kind of innuendo that probably would make Wrigleys blush if they thought too hard about it.

Cat Power/Apple (2013)

Intentionally or otherwise, Cat Power has become the perfect musician for advertisements: her breathy makeovers of familiar songs mix indie cred with mainstream familiarity, as this Apple ad from last year demonstrates. She’s also performed “Space Oddity” for a Lincoln car ad, as well as voiced commercials for Cingular, Garnier, and The Gap. Whither the shy indie wannabe who supported Man or Astroman? and God Is My Co-Pilot back in the early ’90s?

Tegan and Sara/Oreo (2014)

Cementing the new relationship between indie rock and commercials, Oreo’s latest ad includes a brand new song performed by Tegan and Sara. It sounds pretty great, until you reach the part about the flavor and suddenly realize that this was clearly written by ad executives. Somewhere, Bing Crosby is laughing.